Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher of Royal Blood, performing at The Ferret in 2013

Royal Blood have said their show at The Ferret will go down in history.

In October 2013, the band played a free show at The Ferret. The gig attracted only a handful of people and prompted questions to be asked about Preston’s music scene.

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Ben Thatcher, drummer in the popular duo, was recently interviewed and asked about the Preston gig. He responded with shock at talking to somebody who was there.

He said: “You were at Preston?!  Oh my word, that show goes down in the history of Royal Blood. That show was an interesting one.”

When asked why it was interesting, he laughed: “You were there. It was just a very funny time. We were loving it because we were on tour, but those very first few shows for any band can be interesting.”

Times have changed for the band, whose upcoming UK tour sold out in seconds.

This led to some criticising the ticketing system that resulted in many tickets on sale at secondary ticketing sites like Viagogo for three-figure sums only minutes later.

Royal Blood are openly against ticket-touting.

“It ruins it for fans who want to come and see you. It’s not something that we would support at all. We don’t want touts trying to tout our gigs and trying to make money.

“It’s a difficult one to police because anyone can buy a ticket: touts, fans, family or whoever. Especially playing the venues the size that we’re playing, touts can easily ruin a show there. We chose to play smaller venues but these are going to be the biggest venues we have played for our own tour.

“We wanted to still keep it quite intimate and homely with the fans. We’ve got together with people to discuss different ways of doing tickets such as paperless tickets or making it so you can only buy two per person. For our Brighton show we did 30% of our tickets from an independent Brighton record shop. It’s a thing you learn by I think.”

With the Guild Hall officially in the hands of Simon Rigby now, hopefully Preston will get the chance to set the record straight with Royal Blood sooner rather than later.